Amazon's lead is set grow, with 43% of developers saying they expect their use of EC2 to
increase next year, compared to 19% planning further use of Azure. No other provider registered
higher than 10% of developers as a growing platform choice in 2013.

A further notable finding from the Forrester survey was the minimal use of cloud services from
some of the big established IT suppliers such as IBM, HP, SAP or Oracle – Microsoft with Azure
being the only exception.

Those four big players did not feature in the top 12 cloud platforms already in use, nor in the
top 10 environments developers plan to use in the next 12 months.

"Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the recognised pioneer in the market and its early lead and
constant innovation on this early base has attracted the largest base of early adopters and the
software developers who want their business. The traditional tech players are all playing catchup,"
said James Staten, principal analyst at Forrester Research.

"Some market players took a differentiated approach by initially offering a PaaS
[platform-as-a-service] solution instead of IaaS [infrastructure-as-a-service] - Microsoft and
Google most prominently. While this approach empowers developers arguably more, it does so in a way
that limits what they can do. So far the majority of the cloud developers we have researched said
they do not want these constraints and instead prefer either IaaS or a combination of IaaS and
higher services, such as PaaS or discrete cloud services. They want the higher level abstraction
until they don't."

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